To think you can artificially mandate value, while still pretending to operate in the old economic operating system, is absurdity of the greatest order; especially when you consider just how screwed up the old economic operating system is now. That's what happens when an old system is forced to morph, however it can, into something that can at least give the impression that it is still working properly; something we should be a great deal more than just skeptical of considering how even the determination of once simple truths has become horrendously complicated now that these same technological changes have put the control of message, as well as the general flow of information, into the hands of a few, very narrowly interested individuals.
Until we can come to terms with the idea that work, defined as the old factory mentality of doing some singular, specialized task, as a part of a mass production for mass consumption, economy, is simply no longer workable, or sustainable, we are doomed to failure. The simple fact of having livelihoods so inextricably connected to one particular production path or another, puts significant numbers of people in terrible conflicts of interests when that production path is found to be doing horrendous things either to us, or the workers directly, or to the planet itself. And of course that very thing happens with an all too depressing regularity precisely because all of the true costs of doing a particular thing can't be incorporated into the sale price if one truly wants to have a profit at the end of day. And by god, unfortunately, profit is the only value that Capitalism has ever really enshrined, other than, perhaps, personal power.
This leaves us with one, very resilient question: Why is is so hard for Liberals to see that you can only take fixing a thing so far. This applies even more so when you are talking about such things as complex operating systems. In these, with change piled on top of change, and fix piled on top of other fixes, you quickly reach a point, in interactive complexity, where the unintended side effects of what you do with each new fix, become so unpredictable that you can have very little confidence about whether, or not, the fix will only end up creating even more problems than it was meant to fix in the first place. That's why you don't see many people now trying to fix the original Windows operating system to try and have it work in today's complex, enterprise networks of transaction flow. Made ever more difficult because information has been rendered into both pure gold, and the absolute necessity of a Democratic society.
This is what we face. One can only hope that Liberals finally get the memo that doing the same thing that stopped working some time ago, probably won't work now.
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